Sacred Disorder

Occupationally, I have two lives. In one, I’m a writer and in the other I’m a PhD in psychology who tries to help clients expand the capacity of the imagination (work that I like to distinguish from psychotherapy). In the last year or so, the only writing I’ve done has been my longtime dining column for Creative Loafing, “Grazing.”

It’s pretty rare for my interests in food and psychology to meet one another (although the formation of taste does fascinate me). Last night, I had a dream in which the two collided.

The dream was set in the food court of a huge multicultural flea market. There wasn’t much of a plot. I was sitting at a bar eating some kind of food I could not really identify at first. The owner, obviously Indian, kept insisting I try this and that dish and I found most everything mediocre at best.

In the dream, I kept thinking about how often I’ve told people that a chef’s ethnicity is no guarantee that the food he cooks is either authentic or good. The most familiar example is Mexican cooking. I’ve been in lots of restaurants where the staff and clientele were Mexican and the food turned out to be mainly Tex-Mex or tasted really bad regardless of authenticity.

Such was the case in my dream. I realized after a few dishes that I was being fed something like really awful Indian fusion food. The climax occurred when the owner presented me a hot dog wrapped in naan bread, insisting that it was a “genuine Indian pig in a blanket.” I burst out laughing in the dream, noticing that the delicacy had been retrieved from a carnival-style cart. The man insisted that it was a regional specialty. He talked nonstop, eventually getting angry at me because I kept laughing at his claim. Then I found myself getting annoyed.

My father appears

At this moment, my father, who died two years ago on Thanksgiving, appeared in the dream. It may be that the man behind the counter turned into him. There was immediate tension between us, just as there inevitably was in real life. (I’ve written a lot about how my father disinherited me.) He stood beside me and his disapproval and contempt were overwhelming.

In the dream, he was young, probably in his late 30s. He asked me, in accusatory fashion, why I was complaining. When I was a teenager, he used to lecture me endlessly about my “bad attitude” and started the same in the dream, telling me I shouldn’t question what the Indian man had been telling me.

“So,” I said, “I’m supposed to simply dismiss my own experience — just like I’m always supposed to do with you. No matter how nasty you are, I’m supposed to pretend like you’re not. You told me I was to blame for my unhappiness all my life but when mama had her stroke you became miserable yourself. You stayed that way until you died and blamed everyone else for your unhappiness.”

Suddenly, my father started crying. It his hard to describe the emotional impact. He lost all his defenses and I felt profoundly sad myself. I also felt love flowing between us. My fear of him was completely gone in that moment. It was such an alien feeling, even in the dream, that I felt like I’d lost control of myself. Everything seemed to be melting.

I woke up sobbing.

Dreaming as usual

It’s not unusual for me to dream about my father. The horrible thing about being disinherited is that it leaves you feeling fated to try to work through the rejection for the rest of your life, with no sense that you can gain acceptance, since the rejecting  parent is dead.

I think the first part of this dream was a metaphorical expression of the reality of my circumstances when my father was alive, especially as a child. I had no choice but to listen to his distortions — like eating the absurd food I was being fed in the dream — because any effort to resist his anger only made him more enraged or icily contemptuous at best.

Dreams often seize the most mundane images of our lives, like eating at the bar of an ethnic restaurant, to express something in a metaphorical, oblique way. Pat Berry, author of Echo’s Subtle Body, compares the work of psychotherapy to the way Perseus slays Medusa. Because looking directly at Medusa would turn him to stone, Perseus views her in the reflection of his shield in order to decapitate her.

Similarly, we often can’t face the ugly truth directly, so we need to find some means of approaching it indirectly. Dream images are one way of doing that. Indeed, humor — like the absurd image of the naan-wrapped hot dog — is another. (And humor is under-utilized in therapy, which is founded on Freud’s tragic view of life.)

In my dream, my actual father is approached through the comedic metaphor of the dining scene. The implication is that his contempt disguises both his actual love and, perhaps, his lifelong fear that the depression he reviled in me was lurking within his own psyche.

The dream doesn’t suggest a particular remedy apart from the usual: forgiveness. I think it also demonstrates the difference between depression and real grief. The former disguises the latter with all kinds of neurotic symptoms like denial and festering anger.  Depression also numbs the heart’s capacity to love, it seems.

I’m certainly not unfamiliar with the process of forgiveness. One of my own therapists stressed it constantly, even as I was waking up to the reality of my experience with my parents. That was 20 years ago. I think I did fairly well with that process with my mother, but not so well with my father, mainly because he scared the hell out of me — so much so that I avoided visiting my mother during her last 15 years as a stroke patient.

I would really like to come to peace with my father’s rejection of me, but I did learn that forgiveness is a slow process. I also learned that its value is pretty strictly the peace it accords. It doesn’t disguise the truth or make one want to enter a relationship with the person who needs forgiving — any more than my sense of humor made me willing to eat a naan-wrapped weenie!

Tuesday, June 16, is my birthday. It’s also Bloomsday, Dublin’s annual celebration of writer James Joyce and his world-changing novel, Ulysses, published in 1922. Bloomsday is named after Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, which describes a single day in his life, June 16, 1904.

I’ve always enjoyed the coincidence of being born on the day that the 20th Century’s most notorious novel took place. The book was banned in the United States until 1933 and was still considered risque when I was a kid. (No, I wasn’t born in 1930.) I remember buying the novel at Miller’s Bookstore in Buckhead when I was in high school and getting some very disapproving attitude from the woman who sold it to me. This quality of unconventionality and defying authority — particularly moralistic and puritanical authority — was well established in me early on.

In some ways, buying the book was prescient, too, because, being full of references to the original Ulysses, it demonstrated the broad significance of the mythology that had already come to fascinate me in my Latin classes and is so much a part of the depth psychology I studied for my PhD.  I later learned that Joyce’s daughter had undergone an analysis with Carl Jung, whose specific work in depth psychology led me to study the field.

It’s strange how much of life makes sense in retrospect. Events that seemed completely random and unrelated weave themselves into a sensible narrative and picture of character. (I described something of this in an earlier post about my continual encounter with the work of Emanuel Swedenborg.)  James Hillman, the post-Jungian whose work has obsessed me for almost 20 years now, describes such experiences as flashes of the soul’s destiny. Neuroscience is providing mounting evidence that much more of us is given with birth than we’ve previously believed. Whether you regard character and destiny as qualities of the indefinable “soul” or some literal organic process, the effect is the same: Our lives have meaningful telos.

I hasten to say that this is not an either-or proposition. The Greeks analogously understood that, from the empirical perspective, we live in a heliocentric universe, but they also believed the image of Apollo crossing the sky in a fiery chariot was important as an “as if” metaphor. Likewise, we know that we are not blank slates at birth, but, not knowing exactly how we become ourselves, the poetic image of soul expresses the felt sense of this mystery by which our lives seem directed. Poetry is as important as science in our lived experience. It really is.

The last year has been painful in several respects. Our cat of more than 12 years, Marlene, died. This remains so painful to me that I haven’t written about it. Marlene put me to bed every night, climbing on my chest and rubbing my “heart charkra” until I fell asleep.

Another painful loss was Creative Loafing’s discontinuance of my “Headcase” column. As I’ve written earlier, I was in great need of a break after about 20 years of writing it. But it’s become increasingly apparent to me how important it was in my own personal process. I’ve had a couple of offers to resume it with other publications but I’ve avoided making a decision. Part of my grief around this pertains to watching Creative Loafing suffer the declining fortune of the press all over America.

I continue to feel great pain about my father’s disinheritance of me, which I’ve written about earlier (and I did decide to decline participation in a TV documentary on disinheritance). Such an act is calculated to make the disinherited child feel rejected for the rest of his life — not only by the parent but by siblings who, by their honoring of the disinheritance, reinforce the parent’s rejection.

At the same time, however, my dreams during the last few months have turned from raw expressions of anger at my father to more and more recollections of pleasant times with him. We’re destined to love our parents, it seems, even if they reject us — and I guess parents are destined to love their children even when they feel rejected by them. His own mother long ago told me my father would never really grow up. After horrible, often weekly phone calls in which my father used to call me every name imaginable, my mother used to get on the phone afterward and tell me, her voice tremulous, to ignore him.

I remain enormously grateful to my partner Wayne, who has shown me more love than anyone in my life ever did. His mother, like his father before he died, has likewise treated me with open-hearted love that is so alien to me in a parent that I have often found accepting it difficult.

Finally, I’ve noticed that as I get older, I become ever more haunted by the innumerable friends who died during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, including my first partner Rick. Most of them were barely into their 30s. It is an ongoing source of mystification to me why so many friends, far better people than me, died and I’m still around. The memory of the holocaust of the ’80s and my increasing appreciation for the love I do find in the world make me more impatient than ever with needless suffering.

I’m especially appalled by politicians and their media sycophants. Barack Obama, who seemed like such an avatar of genuine change, is rapidly taking on the appearance of another political conman, literally instiutionalizing the corrupt ad hoc policies of the Bush administration and ignoring the promises he made in nearly every respect. As I often tell Wayne, the only good thing about getting old is knowing I probably won’t be around when the U.S. turns into a bona fide banana republic.

At the top of this post is one of my favorite songs, “Anthem,” by Leonard Cohen. This is my favorite version, by Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen from the 2004 film about Cohen. The imagery in the video reinforces the underlying message of the first noble truth of Buddhism — that life is suffering. (Cohen is a Buddhist.)  The song’s point is that suffering is inevitable but must be opposed when it is brought about by governments. Still suffering’s direct experience is essential to finding meaning:  “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” And it is this shattering — the breaking of the heart, really — and the apprehension of meaning that prepare us for love: “To every heart,  love will come, but like a refugee.”

I think this is what I’ve come to understand more deeply in the last year. We hurt in order to make space for love. Once it inhabits our hearts, its safekeeping for ourselves and others is all that matters.

I received an interesting email last week from a researcher for a documentary TV series about wills and inheritance. She read my “Headcase” columns about my father’s disinheritance of me and wants to interview me for the series.

My father died in Novermber of 2007 and turned out to have written me out of his will soon after my mother’s death about 18 months earlier.  He left his entire estate to my two younger brothers.  I’ve not talked to either of them since they informed me about the will. Basically, I now find myself in the same state of estrangement from them that characterized my relationship with my father, and, as with my father, it’s all mixed up with the subject of money.

The compassionate tone of the email from the researcher, who also asked if the “other side” would be willing to talk to her, surprised me. She commented about how hard the feelings I expressed in my columns must be to move through — and said that the makers of the series “for a major US broadcaster” hope that the stories they relate will help others come to peace with the same kinds of experiences. How true that is, I have no idea. Part of me imagines a dreadful family-feud-style reality series.

My gut response is to say no to the interview. One reason is pure embarrassment. She’s entirely right that I have had enormous difficulty coping with the feelings….but I’m not very keen to talk about them in that kind of format, either. I know that sounds strange for someone whose work is psychology and who wrote a personal column for almost two decades, but I would have no control over the editing and how my story would eventually be represented. I did a film piece for the Food Network a few years back and was very critical of the restaurant where they asked me to dine. When the piece was produced, it was literally edited to appear as though I liked the place very much. I refused to do another one.

And years ago, too, because of my acquaintance with Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac, I was invited to be on two national talk shows — Sallie and Oprah — as sort of the poster boy for Prozac. I don’t watch TV and knew nothing about the shows at the time. When their staffs called to do “pre-interviews,” I was stunned by how personal the questions were and I declined the invitations. I’m sure the questions were discreet by today’s standards.

There’s also the matter of not wanting to add more bitterness to the situation. Whatever my father was trying to communicate in his decision obviously seemed appropriate to my brothers and I don’t want to get into a public dispute.

Saying yes to the invitation would almost certainly land me back in exactly the feelings that tormented me much of my life — the horrible guilt of being unable to live up to what my parents wanted me to be from the time I was a child.

Typically, until the time I was about 40, my father would call me and absolutely maul me with criticism. Then my mother would get on the phone or call me later and tell me to ignore everything he said. I know without any doubt, because of the many conversations we had in the few years before her stroke (when I was getting my master’s degree), that she would have been furious that he disinherited me. While I appreciated her support, being between the two of them, as I often was even as a kid, was nightmarish. So I withdrew into estrangement.

It may seem odd, but despite my experience, I do believe that my parents loved me. I can’t say they “did the best they could,” but I don’t think they intentionally sought to hurt me while they were alive, especially not my mother. I’m convinced that much of the pain I endured with her was a result of her trying to change me in order to protect me from the same kind of hurt she experienced in her own life. In other words, I was the object of her projection. There’s no doubt, though, that my father’s decision to disinherit me was calculated to hurt me. This condition — of being both loved and rejected — was the story of my entire life with both of them, regardless of their intentions.

I am glad someone is paying attention to this subject. Very little has been written about disinheritance and its absolutely brutal effect on the disowned heir. But I really do not have the stomach to use myself as an example of the literally daily pain it has caused me.  I’m still thinking about it, but will likely say no.

I’ve never cared anything about cars, with the exception of the vintage MGBs I’ve driven now and then. I’d happily live in a city where I didn’t have to own one.

My disregard for the appearance of my ride, a ridiculously gas-hungry Jeep Grand Cherokee, is shocking to friends who treat their expensive vehicles like direct expressions of their self-esteem. If they acquire a new one, they’re always shocked that I have no idea they’ve spent a zillion dollars on it. (So they tell me.)

I had to buy tires for my car this week. It’s amazing to me how much a damn tire costs. Of course, there’s a range of prices but even a tire is loaded with all sorts of hidden meanings, apparently.

When I called Midtown Tire, I was immediately quoted a price that was well over $200 a tire. I said that I wasn’t willing to pay that much.

“Alright, we have some less expensive,” the guy on the phone said. “But let me ask you a question, Mr…..Um…What’s your name?”

“Bostock,” I said.

“Okay, Mr. Bostock, let me ask you this. Do you care about the safety of your family?”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “That’s not an issue for me,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “let me ask you another question, Mr. Bostock.”

“Okay.”

“Do you care about the quality of your ride? Let me tell you that if you buy these less expensive tires, you’re going to feel like you’ve gone from driving a Mercedes to a jalopy. I’m sure you don’t want that.”

At that point, I hung up without saying good-bye and determined to buy the tires at a shop in Grant Park near our house, where the salesman asked me point-blank, “Do you want an expensive tire or a cheap tire.” I told him cheap sounded good and he said, “Of course it does.” The work was done in barely an hour.

My self-esteem is so low.

Every Father’s Day until this one, I’ve spent most of the day agonizing over the same dilemma:

Should I insult my father by not calling or should I call and make myself subject to his anger and disapproval. Over the years, I’d say it went about 50/50. A complicating factor was always that my birthday fell within a few days of Father’s Day. Daddy never remembered my birthday and it was always embarrassing to be lectured by him for not calling on Father’s Day, when I had not heard from him on my birthday.

But I’m glad I did reach him last year at my brother’s home. He surprised me by getting very emotional and sentimental, telling me over and over that he loved me. When he died in November, I was grateful that I had this memory.

Of course, the pleasant memory was rapidly undone. It turned out that soon after my mother’s death in June 2006, he went to his lawyer and disinherited me. No explanation was given. In fact, the will said, “For reasons known to him, I have made no provision for my son Clifton.”

That he had already written me out of his will when he effusively told me how much he loved me — and he’d done the same thing the Christmas before — is a perfect expression of my lifelong relationship with him. He constantly pulled me in and then rejected me. He could destroy me with a five minute telephone call, making me miserable for a week. This pattern became so familiar to my last partner almost 20 years ago, that if he answered the phone and it was my father, he immediately hung up on him without saying anything to me.

During that time, I severed just about all communication with Daddy for a few years and never asked for or accepted another penny from him. He had been relatively generous to me throughout my 20s and the first half of my 30s. Of course, the money had always been delivered with a devastating lecture that increased my guilt tremendously. Eventually, I realized I had received far less of material value from my father than many of my friends received from their much less prosperous parents.

My mother was a stroke patient most of the last 15 years of her life. Unable to walk, read, write or talk, she became totally dependent on my father, who moved her into assisted living a few years after her stroke. My relationship with my mother had not been much better than the one with my father. She likewise seemed to take every opportunity to tell me what a disappointment I was. A few years before her stroke, she and my father did apologize for their complete lack of acceptance of me as a child. I was glad to hear that, but it was quickly forgotten by both of them and our estrangement never really ended. I remained terrified of them both until the last two years of their lives.

With both my parents’ deaths, I was thrown into rumination about my childhood — something that took me by surprise. I even made a trip to Charlotte to visit the houses and neighborhoods where we’d lived when I was a young child. The houses were all modest and made me appreciate how hard my father had worked to become as successful as he was. Mainly, though I was overwhelmed by painful memories of my mother’s continual disapproval of me. Oddly, I had very few memories of my father because, traveling constantly, he was rarely home. When he was at home, he never really seemed present. I remembered almost nothing of my two brothers, either. Both younger, they shared a room and bonded with one another.

I was invited into one of the houses I visited. I went in my tiny bedroom, off the kitchen, and began crying almost instantly. My childhood is in great part a memory of hiding in my room in one house after another. In those early years, without the distraction of books and music, I developed the habit of curling up and imagining myself falling through outer space. The object was to become as numb as possible. I remembered doing that constantly in that room. I also remembered that it was in that room I learned that I got my mother’s best attention when I was sick.

What was the cause of my parents’ disapproval? I know that my mother decided I was likely gay when I was five years old. That’s when she took me to a psychologist for the first time. I think she wanted me to be happy but her solution, even more than my father’s, was always to try to make me change.

She seized complete control of my time, picked my playmates (no girls) and activities (tumbling at the gym, but no drawing or reading), basically trying to make more of a man of the five year old me. This continued without relent until I was about 10 or 11, at which point she gave up on me and simply criticized everything I did. My father mainly just absented himself, but regularly lectured me about making my mother miserable. He also constantly criticized me for being depressed, telling me relentlessly that it was my attitude that made me unhappy.

I can easily summarize what my parents didn’t do that they should have: They never accepted who I was, much less cultivated who I was. As a breathtaking example, I was placed in one of the first programs for the gifted in North Carolina during middle school and my mother convinced me to drop out of it after a year, thinking it only added to my peculiarity. On the contrary, it was the happiest time of my childhood, but I didn’t argue with her mandatory bid for normality. When I won a state poetry contest, rather than celebrate it, she focused on how the judges had misunderstood one of my poems. This would be my perpetual lot in life if I pursued any form of art as a career, she warned me.

All of this, which I’ve written about in depth before, came back Father’s Day because of a website I happen to stumble onto: Family Acceptance. It’s a site created by Jeff and Patti Ellis, the religious parents of a gay son, Adam (who is now 25). It documents their struggle to accept him after he “came out” at 16. Their motivation in creating the site was helping other parents in the same situation.

I found their story moving, to say the least. Their son experienced much of what I did — rejection from his peers — and pressure to conform to the normative. But his mother writes that she and her husband knew early on that they had two choices — to try to change Adam or to accept him. After some earlier attempts at changing him or hoping that he would change spontaneously, they worked their way to accepting him. They both write movingly about their disappointment and fear when Adam came out to them in high school but they also write that in their confusion they never lost sight of the fact that they loved him.

Adam does not contribute to the site, so there’s no testimony from him that he felt loved throughout this process. But it’s hard to believe that such a site, amply illustrated with pictures of him, would exist without his support. He works with his mother in real estate, so if there were any wounds from the past, they seem to have been healed. Even their real estate site refers people to the Family Acceptance site.

I don’t mind admitting that reading the family’s story late on the night of Father’s Day made me cry deeply. That kind of love is so alien to me. As I wrote above, I never got the sense that my parents wanted me to do anything but hide. When they gave up trying to change me, they didn’t, like Adam’s parents, take the different route of cultivating a deeper relationship with me or supporting me to become more of myself, instead of hiding. Ironically, this long crippled me as a writer. When I received a book contract at 30, I became immediately blocked and I knew from the moment I signed the contract that I would not be able to write what I was being paid in advance to write because I knew it would embarrass my parents.

I am more the age of Adam’s parents than his own age. His family’s story gives me great hope that life for kids growing up gay really is changing. I’ve tried to communicate this to my own clients many times: What is most damaging to a child is not the mistakes parents make or the unkind things they hear from peers. What is crippling is having no refuge, no sense that somebody loves and values them just as they are. Children can withstand all kinds of pain if someone is there to tell them that they they don’t have to change a thing about themselves to be loved.

Hiding in my room throughout childhood, depressed and struggling not to feel anything, it never crossed my mind to tell my parents anything about myself, like my confusion about my sexuality, that would make them more disapproving. Only my grandmother, with whom I maintained a basically secret relationship into my late 20s, gave me a taste of the unconditional love Jeff and Patti Ellis knew they had to give their son, Adam.

I am angry that my father left me this legacy, his disinheritance of me, as a reminder of his lifelong rejection. For all the pain my mother and I suffered together, I know she would have been furious at him for acting with me as he often did with her — like a child instead of an adult. He was literally incapable of seeing the bind in which he placed me — anger if I wasn’t around and contempt if I was there.

And so, while things will never change with my own parents, it makes me very happy to see young men like Adam Ellis have such a different experience.

Here’s the link for the site again: http://www.familyacceptance.com/home.html

Somehow, this song by MGMT seems appropriate. If you haven’t seen their amazing video (disabled for embedding), you’d probably prefer watching it:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=XVnRzEjpUmE